Is there any way to auto-start the Apple mail app?

Question

Is there any way to auto-start the Apple mail app?

Our company offers a 7/24 service where a user can leave a voice mail in our system and our mail server will send an urgent mail message to the iPhone of the employee on duty so it can be handled in a timely manner. The problem we are having is that if someone turns off their phone and starts it again (or if the user opens the running apps window and shuts down the mail app), the users are not getting those urgent emails.

While I understand having an auto-starting app would be undesirable, since every developer might start activating that feature, does Apple iOS6 have any way to tell the mail app to restart on iPhone boot? We have a few people using other smartphones with a competing O/S that sounds similar to "asteroid" ;-) and the mail appears to be always operational, even if you shut down the app.

iPhone 5, iOS 6

Posted on Jan 29, 2013 7:41 AM

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Answer 1

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wjosten

Level 10

95,321 points

Jan 29, 2013 9:45 AM in response to Cortland Steve

iPhone supports push & fetch email, either will do what you want.

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Answer 2

Jan 29, 2013 10:01 AM in response to wjosten

Aha. So it looks like I need to review what settings we are using for push & fetch to see if that may solve our problem. I believe we had the push option on for mail, and fetch set to manual. So perhaps we need to change the fetch to do its thing more often.

And these operate even if someone closes the mail app? (Closes as in shuts it down from the background, I mean. Not just closing it on the screen...)

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Answer 3

wjosten

Level 10

95,321 points

Jan 29, 2013 10:01 AM in response to Cortland Steve

Cortland Steve wrote:

And these operate even if someone closes the mail app?

Yep.

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Answer 4

Courcoul

Level 6

18,558 points

Jan 29, 2013 10:04 AM in response to wjosten

And be sure to set up Notifications for mail so the phone will beep, buzz, flash, whatever when a message comes in.

One issue though (discussed elsewhere): the phone will only Notify once. If you didn't hear or see it, there won't be any further warning (unlike, say, Blackberry's flashing LED). You're gonna have to grab the phone and at least bring up the lock screen to see if there are any notifications queued up.

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Answer 5

wjosten

Level 10

95,321 points

Jan 29, 2013 10:11 AM in response to Courcoul

We got flashing LED's: Settings>General>Accessibility>LED Flash for Alerts.

Is that the same thing as Flash support....😎.

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